IT single-handedly empties sub way cars and restaurants. Behold the power of stinky cheese.

With gym-sock aromas of nose- singeing strength, the most foul of fromage still has ardent fans.

Restaurateur Simon Oren is so smitten with the smelly stuff, he’s holding a Stinky Cheese Fest at his bevy of French eateries on Mondays all this month. Warm potato salad with Alsatian Muenster and raclette Savoyard are two of the nostril-crinklers at Café d’Alsace on the Upper East Side.

“The Muenster cheese, which is the stinkiest of them all, really, is a star at Alsace,” Oren says.

But “Raclette is by far my favorite,” he adds, and it inspired the festival. During a trip to the French Savoy near the Swiss border, Oren got hooked on the Swiss specialty of melted cheese scraped from a giant half-wheel and served with boiled potatoes and cornichons.

When he had one of his chefs duplicate the dish, a week later the restaurant manager pleaded to take it off the menu. Customers sitting near those ordering it were bolting.

But the dish stayed. “Now we decided to make the whole month for people who enjoy that smell, who enjoy that flavor,” which he says, “hits every part of the mouth” with its sharp, salty, sweet goodness.

The nine restaurants of Oren’s Tour de France group are doing variations on cheese soup, the French grilled sandwich croque monsieur, and even resurrecting cordonbleu in versions of quail with tallegio cheese at Nice Matin and chicken with bleu de Bresse cheese and speck at L’Express.

Stinky cheese gets that way from a washed rind on which a bacterium called B-linens thrives, releasing compounds evoking wet hay, rotten eggs, must and other nasal assaults.

In 2004, British scientists used an electronic nose to snuff out the world’s smelliest cheese, settling on a French cow’s milk stinker washed with beer called Vieux Boulogne.

Dan Granke, cheese buyer for Stinky, a new store in Brooklyn, hadn’t heard of it, but promises he has a “special” cheese that “will kill that one” in a smelldown – Vacherin Fribourgeois.

Another candidate for stinkiest cheese: Tomme de l’Ariege, which emptied a subway car when Liz Thorpe, managing director for Murray’s Cheese, personally toted the Provence-made sheep and goat’s milk fromage to Per Se last summer. Riders fled the stench-filled car.

Thorpe says the two smelliest cheeses currently at Murray’s in the West Village are French – a raw cow’s milk cheese called Maroilles and a sheep and goat’s milk mix called Tomme du Berger.

And they smell like?

“In polite cheese parlance, they’re described as barnyard-y, bacon-y or meat-y,” she says. In other circles, they are compared to dirty diapers.

But stinkies remain her favorites.

“There’s such an enormous spectrum of flavor in that one family,” Thorpe says. “And I like cheeses that have a little bit of kick to them.”